Newman had been introduced to lithography by his friend the painter Cleve Gray in 1961 when he made his first lithographs in black and white at the Pratt Graphics Workshop in New York. The present series, which includes his only prints in colour, was made in 1963-4 at Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York, with the encouragement of publisher Tatyana Grosman.

In his introductory text, dedicated to his wife Annalee and dated '4/64', Newman explained that lithography posed for him the challenge of the relationship between the imprint and the paper it is on, with the inevitable intrusion of the paper frame:

'To crop the extruding paper or to cover it with a mat or to eliminate all margins by "bleeding" (printing on papers smaller than the drawing on the stone) is an evasion of this fact. It is like cropping to make a painting. It is success by mutilation.

'The struggle to overcome this intrusion - to give the imprint its necessary scale so that it could have its fullest expression, (and I feel that the matter of scale in a lithograph has usually not been considered) so that it would not be crushed by the paper margin and still have a margin - that was the challenge for me. That is why each canto has its own personal margins. In some, they are small, in others large, still in others they are larger on one side and the other side is minimal. However, no formal rules apply. Each print and its paper had to be decided by me and in some cases the same print exists with two different sets of margins because each imprint means something different to me. In painting, I try to transcend the size for the sake of scale. So here I was faced with the problem of having each imprint transcend not only its size but also the white frame to achieve this sense of scale.

'These eighteen cantos are then single, individual expressions, each with its unique difference. Yet since they grew one out of the other, they also form an organic whole - so that as they separate and as they join in their interplay, their symphonic mass lends additional clarity to each individual canto, and at the same time, each canto adds its song to the full chorus.

'I must explain that I had no plan to make a portfolio of "prints". I am not a printmaker. Nor did I intend to make a "set" by introducing superficial variety. These cantos arose from a compelling necessity - the result of grappling with the instrument.

'To me that is what lithography is. It is an instrument. It is not a "medium"; it is not a poor man's substitute for painting or for drawing. Nor do I consider it to be a kind of translation of something from one medium into another. For me, it is an instrument that one plays. It is like a piano or an orchestra, and as with an instrument, it interprets. And as in all the interpretive arts, so in lithography, creation is joined with the "playing"; in this case not of bow and string, but of stone and press. The definition of a lithograph is that it is writing on stone. But unlike Gertrude Stein's rose, the stone is not a stone. The stone is a piece of paper.

'I have been captivated by the things that happen in playing this litho instrument; the choices that develop when changing a color or the paper-size. I have "played" hoping to evoke every possible instrumental lick. The prints really started as three, grew to seven, then eleven, then fourteen, and finished as eighteen. Here are the cantos, eighteen of them, each one different in form, mood, color, beat, scale and key. There are no cadenzas. Each is separate. Each can stand by itself. But its fullest meaning, it seems to me, is when it is seen together with the others ...'

An explanatory sheet (colophon) at the back gives the following additional information:

'A volume to be used as a book, boxed, containing nineteen original lithographs, consisting of 18 Cantos and a title page by Barnett Newman, together with a preface written by the artist and a colophon page, and dedicated to Annalee Newman. The edition consists of eighteen volumes of which this volume is Number 14 [14 written in]. The papers used are British, French Angoumois and Japanese hand-made papers. The artist used American and French inks - straight, without mixing. The lithographs were printed on a handpress by Zigmunds Priede in the studio of Universal Limited Art Editions, publisher, West Islip, Long Island, New York. All the stones are effaced. Each lithograph is signed and numbered by the artist and embossed with the seal of the publisher. The box is hand-made by Mrs Caroline Horton, bound in vellum with the artist's initials drawn by him and embossed. Typography and page-design of the preface and colophon are by Herbert Matter. Publication was directed by Tatyana Grosman.'

Mrs Grosman told the compiler in June 1977 that she met Newman for the first time at a party at Rauschenberg's, and he said that he would like to come and see her workshop. When he first began, he only intended to make three prints, but the number grew by stages to fourteen and then to eighteen. They even went so far as to make a frontispiece for fourteen. Finally he changed to eighteen, a number he said he liked as it is in Hebrew a symbol for life. His original intention was to cut off the margins and treat the prints like his paintings, but she remarked to him that lithographs should not be replicas of paintings and that one ought to respect the paper. From then on he took the prints home with him and spent many days trying out different margins, by bending the edges of the sheet. Once he was satisfied, the paper for that particular print had to be ordered to that specific size. Cantos V and VI were actually printed from the same stone, with identical images, with and without margins. When the lithographs were printed, he gave a great deal of thought to where they should be signed, and with what kind of pencil, and then to where Universal Limited Art Edition's embossed seal should go. A phone call was put through to the State Department in Washington to check that the official seal on bank notes was placed over the signature of the Treasurer, and the same procedure was followed in embossing the prints.

The following technical information about the prints, with particulars of the stones used, the colours of the inks, the type of paper etc. was supplied by Universal Limited Art Editions in January 1978 after consultation with Zigmunds Priede who printed them.